One of System Shock 2’s more unusual quirks is how it supports four player co-op. This was extremely rare in PC gaming in general at the tail end of the nineties, and it makes System Shock 2 unique among the classic immersive sims.
With its 25th anniversary remaster, Nightdive Studios wanted to ensure this co-op functionality was brought up to date with the rest of System Shock 2. Yet according to producer Daniel Grayshon, getting it to work was a nightmare worthy of SHODAN herself.
Speaking on the Nightdive Studios Deep Dive podcast, Grayshon explains the sticking point was how System Shock 2 uses an old-fashioned direct IP connection based on DirectPlay. “[This] was a very old Windows built-in functionality to do some redirecting somewhere and ultimately try to end up at the destination,” he says.
Aside from DirectPlay being insecure by modern standards, Nightdive also wanted the remaster to support crossplay between PS5, Xbox, Switch and so forth. “We need to strip this out, completely strip this out. We can’t have direct connections anymore because the consoles will not allow that at all,” Grayshon explains. “We need to construct some kind of lobby system, and we need to tap into PlayStation and Xbox and Switch and all this, and try to get them connecting all together in a crossplay environment.”
This process, Grayshon says, was “extremely difficult”, due to the nuances through which System Shock 2’s co-operative play works. “There’s so much that goes into it in terms of things like object ownership,” he says. “When you’re in the game for example, something might be designated a certain number, and then if somebody interacts with that object then the object number becomes the property of somebody else now, and then that data is handed off from that person to that person on their local machine.”
Consequently, Grayshon says that “situations can arise from that where ‘Oh well, the local state didn’t kind of clean out properly on this, and now we’ve changed level, so when we go back into it, it doesn’t know the ownership ID of this anymore and it’s completely gone wrong, and now we need to sort it out.’ It was so complicated to work out. But the guys have done an absolutely fantastic job in just unthreading all of this.”
Grayshon describes the remaster’s co-op functionality as “a complete night and day transformation of everything.” Nonetheless, he stresses that multiplayer should never be your first port of call for System Shock 2. “You should probably play it in singleplayer first to get the true experience of System Shock 2,” he says. “Multiplayer, it’s a different vibe. You don’t feel alone. You don’t feel scared. You don’t feel afraid.”
Nightdive has continued to polish up System Shock 2 since the remaster launched, too. The 1.2 patch released a couple of weeks ago added support for 26 years’ worth of mods and fan missions, which should keep you busy for a while. In his Deep Dive chat, Grayshon adds that Nightdive hopes to further improve the co-op functionality in future updates as well. “I’m looking forward to seeing what improvements we can do to it in the future,” he says. “It’s been so much fun to watch people run through the game and just have fun with it.”
